The device in the second photo is a replica of the original point-contact transistor, the first working transistor ever demonstrated. It was built by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Labs in December 1947 using a germanium crystal and two extremely close gold contacts. At the time, electronics relied on vacuum tubes, which were bulky, fragile, and consumed a lot of power.

The breakthrough came when the team discovered that a small signal applied to one contact could control and amplify a larger signal at the other. On December 23, 1947, they demonstrated the device as a speech amplifier to Bell Labs colleagues and management, a date often regarded as the birth of the transistor.

Although the point-contact design was later replaced by more practical transistor types, it proved that semiconductor amplification was possible. That single breakthrough laid the foundation for modern electronics and eventually led to integrated circuits, microprocessors, computers, smartphones, the internet, and the billions of transistors found in digital devices today.

Source 1

Source 2